Ahead of his participation in a panel discussion on making data the key to programmatic success at ATS Paris tomorrow, ExchangeWire hears from Benoît Cochet (pictured below), director EMEA audience advertising & programmatic sales, Yahoo, who explains that marketers can't be effective without a mobile strategy and describes how Yahoo is trying to help marketers achieve their cross-device goals.

The booming use of mobile transforms the customer experience and conversion funnel. To improve performance, advertising campaigns should increasingly be cross-device. This is the goal of 'Yahoo's Identity Graph', Yahoo’s cross-device solution.

Everyone talks about it, but only a few act upon it. Cross-device, or the advertising art of touching the right person at the right time with the right message, appears to be the holy grail for marketers. Faced with the difficulty of identifying mobile users, they expect solutions that finally allow them to target and track their customers and prospects effectively. Yahoo has developed 'Yahoo's Identity Graph' to address this strategic challenge. The goal? Provide better targeting, better management of repetitions, and a better measure of cross-device efficiency.

When you do not invest in mobile, you deprive yourself of a major source of advertising effectiveness. Although the purchase still takes place mostly on desktop, the discovery of products and services, as well as information retrieval, are increasingly carried out on mobile and tablet. The booming use of mobile is a fact: more than half of French users access the internet from their smartphones (and 46.9% from a PC). In this context, cross-device is a strategic challenge for advertisers. Fifty-four percent of marketers say they want to target and track better across devices. However, the budgets allocated to mobile remain paradoxically underinvested, in comparison with its uses (26% of digital advertising expenses). Marketing managers put the blame on the absence of tools and reliable solutions, allowing them to connect the various devices to a single user.

460 million qualified cross-device profiles

Unique identification is indeed the first requirement to understand the conversion funnel and address, in a clever yet complementary manner, additional customers and prospects. Yahoo solves this problem with its solution 'Yahoo's Identity Graph', launched in March 2016. With multiple data sources and the mandatory creation of an account to enjoy Yahoo services (email, Tumblr, Flickr, etc), we have more than 460 million qualified cross-device profiles; of which, 240 million are uniquely identified. To qualify our other users (one billion per month), we completed this deterministic approach with a probabilistic approach, based on calculated assumptions. Via our proprietary technology, and the intelligence of our algorithms, we are able to uniquely identify these users. The volume and diversity of our sources, as well as the quality of the data we collect, offer us an extremely fine remapping.

Yahoo collects 200 billion data points on a daily basis. In addition to the IP data that provides us information on log-in times and places, we have behavioural and media data via Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search, blogging network Tumblr, photo and video sharing site Flickr, or content channels like Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, etc. For example, while analysing email domain names and email subjects, we know precisely the purchase intents and interests of our clients, such as a confirmation ticket to New York sent by Air France and categories and purchase amounts on Amazon. A plethora of shopping data is available for advertisers.

Flurry's data: an unprecedented impact

Beyond Yahoo users, we refine our knowledge on mobile users to a very wide scale. In addition to the diversity of data sources from our ecosystem, we capture data from all applications using Flurry, the mobile ‘Google Analytics’. Flurry tracks 2.1 billion devices worldwide and is integrated in more than 800,000 applications, including brands such as Skype, Shazam, Snapchat, Vine, Pinterest, and Angry Birds. In effect, we can remap 83% of page views across devices served on our advertising systems (89% in the UK and 80% in France).

An answer to ad blocking

Far from being optional, cross-device is part of a major strategic shift for the advertising market. Excessive repetitions, bombarded users, advertising waste, deteriorated advertising effectiveness: working in silos on one side with PC and on the other side with tablet and mobile, is counterproductive. This led to a severe user backlash. Over-solicited and misdirected, users install ad-blockers demanding helpful and responsive advertising.

Thankfully, cross-device technology is a suitable remedy to these problems. It can effectively find the right users wherever they are, manage the advertising exposure frequency, and target by screen; as well as better understand the user journey and conversion funnel while integrating all screens. Overall, by engaging the right audience at the right time on the right device, cross-device ultimately optimises the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

Towards relevant attribution models

'Yahoo's Identity Graph' demonstrates the effectiveness of mobile and its contribution to sales. For one of our customers, we compared the effectiveness of a cross-device campaign with a campaign using PC only. The combination of different devices directly impacted the ROI with an increase in the conversion rate of 88%, compared to PC only.

With our cross-device campaign reporting, advertisers can finally understand the contribution of each screen to the overall performance of their campaign, so they can make the most of a cross-device activation. Because it also helps control the repetition, cross-device avoids the phenomenon of over-exposure or advertising underexposure. In other words, 'Yahoo Identity Graph' offers brands the opportunity to build attribution models and cross-device optimisation. On top of everything, it has a double benefit for marketing managers: a better allocated and optimised budget for improved advertising performance.

Cochet will be participating in a panel discussion on ‘How the Buy-Side Can Make Data the Key Component to Success in Programmatic’ at ATS Paris on 13 April. Find more information here.